Installation

Installing the Docker image

For many users, installing the Docker image will be easier than installing all of OCRmyPDF’s dependencies. For Windows, it is the only option.

If you have Docker installed on your system, you can install
a Docker image of the latest release.

Follow the Docker installation instructions for your platform. If you can run this command
successfully, your system is ready to download and execute the image:

docker run hello-world

OCRmyPDF will use all available CPU cores. By default, the VirtualBox machine instance on Windows and OS X has only a single CPU core enabled. Use the VirtualBox Manager to determine the name of your Docker engine host, and then follow these optional steps to enable multiple CPUs:

Note that ocrmypdf has its own separate -v VERBOSITYLEVEL argument to control debug verbosity. All Docker arguments should before the ocrmypdf image name and all arguments to ocrmypdf should be listed after.

Installing on Mac OS X

These instructions probably work on all Mac OS X versions later than 10.7 (Lion). OCRmyPDF is known to work on Yosemite and El Capitan, and regularly tested on El Capitan.

Ubuntu 14.04 only installs unpaper version 0.4.2, which is not supported by OCRmyPDF because it is produces invalid output. This program is an optional dependency, and provides page deskewing and cleaning. See Dockerfile for an example of how to building unpaper 6.1 from source. If you choose to install unpaper later, OCRmyPDF will use the foremost version on the system PATH.

Installing on Windows

Direct installation on Windows is not possible. Install the Docker container as described above.

Installing HEAD revision from sources

If you have git and python3.4 or python3.5 installed, you can install from source. When the pip installer runs,
it will alert you if dependencies are missing.

To install the HEAD revision from sources in the current Python 3 environment:

pip3 install git+https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF.git

Or, to install in development mode, allowing customization of OCRmyPDF, use the -e flag:

pip3 install -e git+https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF.git

On certain Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, you may need to use
run the install command as superuser:

sudo pip3 install [-e] git+https://github.com/jbarlow83/OCRmyPDF.git

Note that this will alter your system’s Python distribution. If you prefer
to not install as superuser, you can install the package in a Python virtual environment:

However, ocrmypdf will only be accessible on the system PATH after
you activate the virtual environment.

To run the program:

ocrmypdf --help

If not yet installed, the script will notify you about dependencies that
need to be installed. The script requires specific versions of the
dependencies. Older version than the ones mentioned in the release notes
are likely not to be compatible to OCRmyPDF.

Languages

OCRmyPDF uses Tesseract for OCR, and relies on its language packs. For Linux users,
you can often find packages that provide language packs:

# Debian/Ubuntu users
sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr-chi-sim

You can then pass the -l LANG argument to OCRmyPDF to give a hint as to what languages it should search for. Multiple
languages can be requested.